Philosophy

“Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy”.

"Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it."

“Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it.”

“Achilles is still sulking, humiliated by a…tortoise; but at least we have a universe and…we can be assured that its ultimate trajectory is toward Good.”

“The secret life of things is nothing less than the life of God.”

“Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.”

“Hamlet was right: you either are…or you are not. There is no disembodied ‘being’ walking abroad, seeking an ‘identity’. King Hamlet’s ghost is not real!”

“Our own number system is based on a highly specialized, and not necessarily privileged, concept of quantity.”

“The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.”

“Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.”

“The moral value of an event lies in the act itself, not in its conformity to a set of norms and not in its consequentiality…every event is its own end!”

“The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.”

“Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with a celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate!”

“Whatever is, is self-aware, and what is self-aware, is!”

“Everything I needed to know about cosmology, I learned watching my grandchildren play with blocks.”

“1,500 years ago, we didn’t have these problems. We knew all that we needed to know about life.”

“In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, and the total absence of meaning – aka the Absurd.”

“God is ‘special’ only to that extent that in God, A and Ω are one…God is what it means to initiate and what it means to culminate.”

“Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!”

“Things are the way they are simply because they are the way they are.”

An astronomer explains the search to find its origins...

“Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.”

“Our so-called World is a reflection without an object; it is the sound made by one hand clapping.”

“Reciting the alphabet is like peeling layers off of a prize-winning red onion.”

“I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.”

“Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.”

“What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened!”

“Anyone can go for a walk in the woods; only Frost can ‘walk this way’.”
Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of non-conformity and adventure - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about?"

“I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous.”

“Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away!”

“Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!”

“How new wealth is to be distributed is just as important as how old wealth has been distributed.”

“In this model, God is a giant switching station, sharing qualities among myriad monads.”

“Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.”

“What You See Is What You Get! Right…or wrong?”

“…This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but nearly universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings.”

“It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.”

"Advances in neurotechnology do raise important privacy concerns. However, I believe these debates can overlook more fundamental threats to privacy."

“Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?”

“I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious."

“Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.”

“Turns out, I am the Worldwide Wrinkle…and so are you!”

“Popular music after World War II is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious… Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to wind and a time to unravel, and now is the time to unravel.”

“There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).”

“Of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere.”

“In the absence of God, or any transcendent reality, the meaning of life can only be death, oblivion, the total absence of meaning, the Absurd.”

“Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.”

“Failure to appreciate the comic elements in Job has resulted in an almost universal misreading of the text.”

“I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.”

“Mythology is common to all ages. There is no theology, philosophy, or science without it.”

“Don’t our morals reflect our values? Surely the concepts are at least related. Yes, they are related…they are antonyms. A value is the opposite of a moral.” 

“My so-called inner world, the ‘I’, contains nothing; it is simple. It admits no change…there is no inner world.”

“Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.”

“It is the uniqueness of events that 'creates' spacetime; it is not spacetime that makes events unique.”

“The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.”

“The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.”

“Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right.”

I’ll take the wisdom of Yogi Berra over that of Bill Clinton any day: Whatever is, is!

Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today?

The world in which we seem to live might not be the only world there is…or all there is to this world. 

Some people's search takes them to Fatima or Lhasa or into Outer Space. Mine took me to the dentist.

Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan!

“John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.”

The hidden grammar censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Why did the speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence, unless they are somehow connected?” A major fallacy that comes with a huge price tag.

“Parmenides anticipated Trinitarian theology and 19th century German dialectics (Hegel, Marx). May we refer to his cosmology as Monothreeism™?”

If a tiny thread had the power to ruin a movie, what in my own life, deep in the background, bears such importance to my bigger picture? And if it’s so important, why isn’t it front and center?

Editor’s note: It’s that time of year when many readers attend ‘summer theater.’ If Shakespeare is on the bill, you may find this essay relevant. Don’t leave home for the theater without reading this first!

For Aristotle, there is a real distinction between what a thing is and what a thing is like.

The purpose of this essay is not to resolve, or even rehash, the Problem of Evil, but rather to situate the Problem of Evil in the context of an even broader problem that I call, ‘the Problem of Good’.

Do our lives have meaning? You bet they do! But what is that meaning, and from where does it come?